61–70 of 87 posts
If true, is this good? Isn't the purpose of work to end (or to diminish, at least) all work? (and leave us with more time to take care of ourselves, our minds, our bodies, our souls, our kids, our parents, our friends, our neighbours, our politics, our environment etc)
Work never ends. If we 'developed' the world, why not develop other planets and so on and so forth. Your utopia is close to North Korea's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trap I find myself in is that (at least here in the UK) we are all in competition with each other for a fixed, limited resource. Housing. I earn a very good wage, as does my wife, but we still work tough jobs for long hours so that we can afford a nice house, in a good location, with a garden for our kids to grow up in. No matter how much people like me earn, we will just use it to bid up house prices even more.…
That's a cultural construct, not an economic one. In a lot of other countries, it's perfectly acceptable to rent or live in flats, or around cities that are not the capital; but in England, these conditions carry a huge social stigma, which is compounded by deeply-entrenched classism. It's a perfect storm, really; but yeah, you're doing it to yourself. Move to Manchester ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trap I find myself in is that (at least here in the UK) we are all in competition with each other for a fixed, limited resource. Housing. I earn a very good wage, as does my wife, but we still work tough jobs for long hours so that we can afford a nice house, in a good location, with a garden for our kids to grow up in. No matter how much people like me earn, we will just use it to bid up house prices even more.…
That's a cultural construct, not an economic one. In a lot of other countries, it's perfectly acceptable to rent or live in flats, or around cities that are not the capital; but in England, these conditions carry a huge social stigma, which is compounded by deeply-entrenched classism. It's a perfect storm, really; but yeah, you're doing it to yourself. Move to Manchester ;)
The rental versus buying dichotomy is orthogonal to the issue of limited supply. If everyone rents there is still the same overall demand for accommodation, hence rents would be high (due to limited supply) and that would propagate through to push up property prices. End result is the same.
Uh, yeah, because there was room to grow or move in to. In 1900 people were still settling in America, and production has grown immensely worldwide at a steady rate since then, while population was relatively low. Now, population has grown three fold in the last hundred years: http://www.historyfuturenow.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/1... There are more old people alive than ever before as a percentage of the overal…
There are plenty of jobs that cannot and will never be able to be automated. Like a kindergarten teacher. Coincidentally (or not so much) those are the jobs that improve society and life the most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a cultural construct, not an economic one. In a lot of other countries, it's perfectly acceptable to rent or live in flats, or around cities that are not the capital; but in England, these conditions carry a huge social stigma, which is compounded by deeply-entrenched classism. It's a perfect storm, really; but yeah, you're doing it to yourself. Move to Manchester ;)
> That's a cultural construct The rental versus buying dichotomy is orthogonal to the issue of limited supply. If everyone rents there is still the same overall demand for accommodation, hence rents would be high (due to limited supply) and that would propagate through to push up property prices. End result is the same.
I have no real doubt this is true, but what may be different in today's situation is that something akin to true "artificial general intelligence" is not completely unfeasible (or something close enough to it that there's no practical difference). This is quite different to previous technological revolutions, where it was primarily manual labour that was automated. We seem to have in general conceded that many of tho…
what happens if there really is nothing we're better at than a computer It's not that you have to compete with computers while being naked and without tools in outer space. The line between Humans and Computers will continue to blur. Right now, you carry a computer with you in your pocket. Tomorrow you will have it in your head. And it will aid your thinking without you having to type stuff into a keyboard and lookin…
Of course, it's pretty difficult to predict the future, and it's possible that human-computer hybrids will continue to outperform vanilla computers in the long term (as you point out).
Looking at current uk employment numbers[1] , it seems that healthcare , education accommodation and food services count as 23% of the economy. But : 1. Will they grow under new conditions ? These sectors historically didn't enjoy more productivity due to technology. Economists called this "baumol's disease". But this is changing. We're seeing higher education and maybe some lower education being automated. In japan…
> 1. Will they grow under new conditions ? Some conditions don't change. An OAP with limited mobility will always require assistance day-to-day, and it's the sort of thing robots are really bad at. OAPs are also growing in number, as life expectation increases. Another one: you will always need someone to help give birth - in fact, as hospitals are deemed too expensive and scaled back, we will likely need more nurses…
The 40% came from a study at oxford, which i think was a bit conservative , because it didn't take into account the possibility of creative jobs being automated.
>> I have no doubt we can create more office-based bullshit roles
Sure we can. But will we ? i'm not so sure.
>> but that is economically challenging unless we rethink how money is created and distributed.
If that happens , a lot of things would change, for both directions - more jobs and less jobs.
>> Again, this will not be touched by automation.
Automation is the less powerful technology working on healthcare. But if you can detect diseases very early , and have very effective , side-effect free and long-term treatments , healthcare will become more efficient.
Or let's talk about limited mobility(your example) - a leading cause is severe arthritis. But maybe we can cure that ?
>> home-births
Maybe we'll see growth there.But i would guess it's not that big of job provider. and even for home births, there's telemedicine and remote continuous monitoring , i think in use today - saving work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no financial expert, but I believe HFT benefits many people by making the difference between buy-price and sell-price smaller and increasing the liquidity of the market.
The banks seem to be the only ones benefiting from this as far as I can tell. My life doesn't feel any better for HFT.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what happens if there really is nothing we're better at than a computer It's not that you have to compete with computers while being naked and without tools in outer space. The line between Humans and Computers will continue to blur. Right now, you carry a computer with you in your pocket. Tomorrow you will have it in your head. And it will aid your thinking without you having to type stuff into a keyboard and lookin…
> Right now, you carry a computer with you in your pocket. Tomorrow you will have it in your head. And it will aid your thinking without you having to type stuff into a keyboard and looking at a screen. You're assuming people will want it in their heads. I'd rather be naked and without tools, than become part of The Borg. YMMV though.
They all have mobiles now.
If true, is this good? Isn't the purpose of work to end (or to diminish, at least) all work? (and leave us with more time to take care of ourselves, our minds, our bodies, our souls, our kids, our parents, our friends, our neighbours, our politics, our environment etc)
The trap I find myself in is that (at least here in the UK) we are all in competition with each other for a fixed, limited resource. Housing. I earn a very good wage, as does my wife, but we still work tough jobs for long hours so that we can afford a nice house, in a good location, with a garden for our kids to grow up in. No matter how much people like me earn, we will just use it to bid up house prices even more.…